Google is stuffing AI into everything and setting money on fire to stay ahead.
Alphabet logged an 18 per cent jump in fourth-quarter revenue, with sales near $114 billion, as ads and cloud did the heavy lifting. Net income hit $34.5 billion, up 30 per cent on the same period a year earlier.
The company posted a record $403 billion in sales for 2025, the first time it cleared $400 billion in annual revenue. Profit for the year came in at about $132 billion.
Alphabet is now talking about capital expenditure of $175 billion to $185 billion this year, up from $91 billion to $93 billion in 2025. That is a lot of concrete and silicon, and it is only getting messier as power supply becomes the real bottleneck.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said: “Maybe the top question is definitely around compute capacity. How do you ramp up to meet this extraordinary demand for this moment, get our investments right for the long term, and do it all in a way that we are driving efficiencies?”
Alphabet shares swung between six per cent down and two per cent up after hours while execs soothed investors. The market liked the growth, but could not move past the data centre bill.
Google Cloud is riding the AI land grab, posting nearly $18 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, up 48 per cent from the same period in 2024. That growth sits neatly alongside the company selling the picks and shovels to anyone desperate enough to rent compute.
Rivals have been busy too, with Microsoft, Meta Platforms and the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple dropping quarterly numbers last week, and Amazon reporting earnings on Thursday. Job’s Mob still collects fat cheques for keeping Google as Safari’s default search button.
Google bragged it pulled ahead with the November launch of Gemini 3, the beefiest version of its AI model and chatbot. The Gemini app is now at 750 million monthly users, up from 650 million in October.
Search is still the big beast, with about $63 billion in quarterly search revenue, even as AI upstarts like ChatGPT, Anthropic and Perplexity nibble at the edges. Google is also pushing “AI Mode”, which turns search into a chatbot-style exchange with fewer links.
In September, Google ducked the nastier antitrust penalties in a federal case aimed at its search monopoly, when US district judge Amit Mehta barred exclusivity payments but rejected any harsher fixes. The Justice Department floated forcing a sale of Chrome, but the judge pointed out that the AI race was making the market more competitive.
The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street treated that as a win for Google since the default-search cash river can keep flowing. Google’s ad business is still in the antitrust crosshairs too, with US district judge Leonie Brinkema set to weigh remedies after finding Google illegally monopolised online auction tech for web ads.
